Unfortunately - despite graphic language, fearless face-to-face threats, and an Internet posting outlining a timetable for the massacre - authorities, students and teachers did not listen.

Here are extracts from Eric Harris's web site:

"If I don't like you, or don't like what you want me to do, you die. God, I can't wait until I kill you people. I'll just go to some down-town area in some big city and blow up and shoot everything I can. No remorse, no sense of shame. I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will. I don't care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can. I live in Denver and would love to kill almost all of its residents. Shut up and die. Today is my last day on Earth. Be prepared."

And this from a newspaper report:

His [Harris] parents, questioned by police for four hours [yesterday], were unaware their son secretly built explosives in the family garage.

So, what can we learn from this tragedy? Could the misery and grief have been averted? Allow me to say this to relatives and friends of youth: You have two eyes, two ears and one mouth. Go figure.

As for Eric and Dylan, I trust that their tormented souls have been forgiven by the souls of those innocents they so brutally and callously murdered, and that, in death, they now see the folly of their twisted idealism. Forgiveness, however, may not be forthcoming from those bewildered souls who have been left behind to grieve. We can only weep and, hopefully, learn to watch and listen.